by Josh Delman

I'm a crazy college student who likes to write things. I eat peanut butter out of the jar with a spoon. I've really been appreciating bananas recently. I'm going to start telling people that when they ask me "what's new?"

If you're interested, there's an RSS feed. For your auditory pleasure: my Last.fm. Some jd87 highlights: Live at Westgate, Haikus, Pt. 1.

This site might be a blog, it might be a a repository for fiction, or it might be something else altogether. Please enjoy.

2009: January / February / March / April / May / June / July / August / September

© 2009 and beyond
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Review: A Student's Guide to Cognitive Neuroscience  

The book: A Student's Guide to Cognitive Neuroscience by Jamie Ward¹.

A review of any cognitive neuroscience textbook is likely to use a lot of esoteric or unfamiliar terminology – there is, of course, some requisite background knowledge required for devouring such a book. You will be surprised to find that none of that language will find its way into this review. There will be no talk of Ramon y Cajal's neuron doctrine, nor the center-surround structure of ganglion and lateral geniculate nucleus cells; no mention of parietal neglect, nor a discussion of early-attention vs. late-attention models. This is because I was unable to read a single damn page of this thing.

I want to focus on one thing only, and that is the olfactory nightmare in which the pages of this book are absolutely drenched. The book smells like shit.

Not actual "shit," per se - "shit" in this context (and often in a similar context, i.e. one where a person refers to the smell of something as "like shit," or "like ass," etc.) simply means awful, terrible, cringe-worthy, vomit-inducing -- smelling so bad that if you smelled the smell all the time, even the most persuasive crisis hotline operator would have a hard time convincing you not to kill yourself.

The book smells like used fryer grease. Have you ever smelled the back of McDonald's? I mean like, you drive around to the back, where the vents shoot out a noxious, airborne form of the thick yellowy grease that your french fries were cooked in. Have you ever gone to the McDonald's on the U.S.S. Intrepid²? Well, that's exactly what this book smells like. Every page. The smell is practically baked in. And it's totally inappropriate.

My score: Zero out of Eighty-Seven (0/87).


1. This will be the first of many book reviews to come -- so stay tuned. ↩

2. U.S.S. Intrepid: An Essex-class aircraft carrier built during World War II, now open for tourism, permanently parked in the Hudson River. A climactic scene in "National Treasure" occurs here, but I'll spare you a full description and just tell you that it involves Nicholas Cage. ↩

May 1, 2009

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